Emerging trends of integrated care for children and youth’s mental health in South-Eastern Norway - Horizon scanning on new models to be broaden out in the next 2-10 years

In response to system fragmentation and lack of coordination, different integrated care models (ICMs) are being developed to tackle the, in parallel, growing demand for healthcare services and to better tailor the services to the patients’ needs. New models have tended to focus on adults and there is an expressed need to develop models specifically for children and youth with mental health difficulties. With the pressing urgency to find new ways to enact on the system fragmentations this target group is facing today, this thesis has located emerging ICMs addressing the key fragmentation problems of silo-thinking, interface obstacles, service gaps/overlaps, access barriers and discontinuity of care. The following models have been identified in the study as emerging in South-Eastern Norway: 1) 0-26 Lier, 2) Ung Arena, 3) Forward Thinking Birmingham, 4) Orygen Youth Health 5) “Bedre helsehjelp til barn i barnevernet”, 6) Stillasbyggerne, 7) FACT Ung and 8) Barn og unges helsetenste, Helse Fonna HF. Through this paper, important trends and additional models of integrated care have been highlighted and the findings support the ongoing shift to a more community care approach to integrated care. The identification of what thought patterns to leave behind and where to shift the focus to can help guide for future implementations and evaluations of more systematic and long-term solutions to the experienced gaps in the system for children and youth with mental health difficulties in South-Eastern Norway.